Chapter three

Zara’s Pov

I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at nothing.

The heels were off. The makeup half removed, one side of my face clean and the other still painted. I hadn’t finished because somewhere between the cotton pad and the mirror I had stopped moving entirely.

I’ll be back tomorrow night.

His voice kept finding me in the quiet. Low and certain, the way he said everything like decisions were made somewhere deep before they ever reached his mouth.

I pressed the cotton pad to my cheek and made myself breathe.

It was him. There was no more room for maybe. Adrian Voss had walked back into this city and somehow, out of every room in every building, had ended up in mine. In the one room where I had nowhere to hide and everything to lose.

Five years. He had gone five years without a word. No explanation. No goodbye. Just absence, sudden and complete, like a door closing quietly in the night.

And now he was back, watching me with those dark eyes like I was something he was trying to remember, and I was supposed to just what. Function normally. Pretend.

I dropped the cotton pad harder than I meant to.

*He doesn’t know,* I told myself. *He cannot know. You held it together tonight and you will keep holding it.*

I almost believed it.

I was in the kitchen making tea I didn’t want when the knock came.

Late. Too late for anything casual. I set the kettle down and stood still, listening.

Kofi texted an hour ago on my way which meant nothing concrete. The house had the particular silence of being exposed. Open in a way I didn’t like.

The knock came again.

I moved toward the door and looked through the peephole.

The breath left my body completely.

I opened it because not opening it would have told him something.

Adrian stood in the low light of the porch, hands in his jacket pockets, dark eyes finding me immediately like I was easy to locate in any room, any distance. That hadn’t changed. That had always quietly undone me.

“Zara.” My name in his mouth after five years felt like something I wasn’t prepared for. “You’re still here.”

And you were just watching me dance. “Where else would I be?” I said. Steady. I was quietly proud of that.

“You look different.”

“It’s been five years, Adrian.” Something sharpened in my voice before I could smooth it down. Not much. Just a flicker of the thing I’d kept carefully buried the part that remembered sitting by a window the week he disappeared, waiting for a message that never came. “People don’t stay the same.”

He looked at me for a moment. Something shifted behind his eyes not guilt exactly, but recognition of what I hadn’t fully said.

“No,” he said quietly. “They don’t.”

I held the door wider. “Kofi’s almost home.”

He sat at the kitchen table the way he’d sat in that leather chair, easy, contained, taking up space without effort. I busied myself with the kettle and kept my back turned because it gave me somewhere to put my face.

“When did you get back?” I asked.

“Three weeks ago.”

Three weeks. Back three weeks and I hadn’t known. I hadn't felt it. Hadn’t been given a single warning before the universe dropped him directly into my VIP room without so much as a signal.

“How long are you staying?”

“Indefinitely.”

I set a cup in front of him and sat across the table and arranged my face into something warm and familiar. Zara. Soft. Nothing to hide.

His eyes moved across my face slowly. Not casual. Deliberate the way someone looked when they were comparing something to a memory and finding the margins didn’t quite line up.

“Where are you working these days?” he asked.

“Restaurant. Late nights mostly.” Smooth. Practiced. Eight months of the same answer. “It covers things.”

“Which restaurant?”

I looked up.

He was watching my reaction. Not the question, the reaction. The slight pause before I answered, the way my hands had stilled around the cup.

“Small place near campus,” I said evenly. “You wouldn’t know it.”

“Try me.”

A beat of silence.

“Why the interest?” I kept my voice light. Almost amused. “Are you planning to leave a review?”

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The shape of one without the warmth.

“Just catching up,” he said.

He wasn’t just catching up. And we both knew it.

The front door opened and Kofi walked in.

He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. Shoulders carrying something. Eyes slightly too alert for a man coming home to rest. He registered Adrian and the fatigue cracked open into something genuine relief, warmth, the uncomplicated joy of a man seeing someone he’d actually missed.

They stood and gripped each other, forearms locked, a language passing between them that had nothing to do with me.

But when they pulled apart I caught it the way Kofi’s jaw tightened briefly when he smiled. The way his eyes flicked once toward the window before settling. Small things. The kind most people missed.

I didn’t miss things.

What are you into, Kofi, I thought, watching my brother laugh at something Adrian said. *What have you gotten into.

They fell into easy conversation and I stood in the doorway watching them and understanding something that settled cold and heavy in my chest.

Adrian was back in Kofi’s life. Which meant he was back in mine. The dinner table. The front door. Every ordinary space I had built my secret carefully around.

The two worlds I had kept surgically apart were no longer separate. They were in the same room now. The same table. The same man sitting in both of them without knowing it.

The system I had spent eight months building was already cracking at the foundation.

I was clearing cups when Adrian appeared in the kitchen doorway.

Kofi had gone to shower. The house held its breath.

“It was good to see you,” I said without turning. Warm. Final.

“Zara.”

I turned.

He was leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching me with that expression again the one that lived halfway between suspicion and certainty. Like a man who had already formed the question and was only deciding whether to ask it out loud.

“That restaurant.” Casual voice. Careful eyes. “What nights do you work?”

“Why?”

“I’m around late sometimes.” A pause, precisely timed. “Might stop in.”

The air between us was very still.

“I’ll let you know when my schedule changes,” I said.

He held my gaze for one second too long. Then he nodded once, slowly, and pushed off the doorframe.

“I’ll see you soon, Zara,” he said.

Not goodbye.Not take care.

I’ll see you soon like it was already arranged. Like he had looked at the board and moved his piece and was simply waiting for me to realize it.

I stood in the kitchen long after I heard the front door close, hands flat on the counter, the silence pressing in around me.

He wasn’t going to wait for me to slip.

He was going to engineer the moment himself.

And I was running out of time to figure out which version of me he was actually looking for.